


Land of Clockwork and Grimdark Broads

by kayliemalinza



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bondage, Doomed Timelines, Dubious Consent, F/M, Multiple Daves, POV Second Person, Tentacles, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-16
Updated: 2011-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-02 08:48:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You sleep in shifts because that's supposed to be safe, and it is, until you wake up and Rose is leaning over you with her face a weird shade of gray and her eyes glowing and these little black fronds jutting out all over the place. Proto-tentacles, you guess. They're kind of cute.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Land of Clockwork and Grimdark Broads

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/gifts).



You sleep in shifts because that's supposed to be safe, and it is, until you wake up and Rose is leaning over you with her face a weird shade of gray and her eyes glowing and these little black fronds jutting out all over the place. Proto-tentacles, you guess. They're kind of cute. Yeah she's surrounded by an unctuous cloud of tangible angst or whatever but it's not that scary once you realize she looks like a licorice chia pet. The cloud brings out the pale of her skin and makes her pink accessories look less like girly shit and more like the swollen corpse of some innocent creature. It goes with the theme. You like themes. Your themes are inspired more by nacho cheese than eldritch horrors but as a fellow artist you appreciate the concept. You also appreciate the nap you were having.

"Lalonde," you say, casually adjusting your shades. They went askew in your slumber. Your shirt is rucked up all the way to nipplesville but that, technically speaking, is a state of deshabille, and just the kind of pin-up pose Rose should go for. Your trope-subverting manliness is just the icing on the beefcake."i appreciate you trying to mix things up, but creepy voyeur really isnt my thing," you say. "im cool with dress up though maybe you can get a sexy cat outfit or something." Rose, if she were in a talking mood right now, would probably make some snide remark about cliches but sexy cats are the shit. They are a traditional fucking bulwark of pop culture and you are a man of classical tastes. You look good in smoking jackets.

Rose's little tentacle dealies start flailing around and twisting themselves into little corkscrews and generally spazzing the fuck out. This is your cue to vamoose. The vamoosing is more impressive than it sounds because you were sleeping in a little cog-nook with your tuxedo jacket slung over the mouth of it like a dapper homeless guy living in the sewer system of a volcano, and Rose and her tentacles have you cornered. But it's nothing a totally sweet triple back flip can't handle, and then you're leaping from one big-ass gear to another like a lava gazelle.

Rose roils her stank ectoplasmic self right along after you. This is getting to be a pretty regular occurrence. You were maxed out on smooth moves to begin with but Rose has been getting steadily faster and slimier. Things get hinky in the gridwork at the base of your high-rise and you end up trapped between a couple of I-beams. Rose gets you lashed pretty solid with her tentacles around your waist, your arms, your legs. You swear they're longer than they used to be. The tentacles, not your legs, though that growth spurt Bro promised you is due any day now.

More chibi tentacles come squirming out of Rose's shirt collar and wrap around your head, tapered and weirdly firm like undercooked pasta. You're not in danger of suffocation at the moment, but your only weakness is that your ears are ticklish and that may be coming into play now. The tentacles squeeze tighter the more you struggle. It feels kinda nice, but that's not something you're ever going to admit out loud.

The first time this happened, you expected a stench like that shitty beach Bro took you to on vacation, where you tripped under the pier (so uncool) and fell face-first into one of the moorings and got cut to shreds by the barnacles. There's no crab-poop smell, here; just lava and metal and your own sweat dripping all over the place, the normal scent of your land, then some weird dead musk and Rose's fruity shampoo.

One of the tentacles starts poking between your lips, so you clamp your teeth together. You've seen enough hentai to know where this is going.

"excuse me," you say as clearly as you can with your teeth grinding together and a tentacle exfoliating the cracks in your lips. Maybe some of that gothy slime will work like chapstick. Fuck knows you need some. "you can't just jump to second base like this. i expect you to buy me dinner or something." You're marble-mouthing like a dumb-ass but it doesn't matter because Rose is a crappy listener in this state anyway. 'tentacleTherapist' your ass. You thought girls were supposed to be sensitive and shit.

Rose just stares at you, her face all dark in the shadow of the I-beam and her eyes glowing in the middle of that. Then she shifts her face into the light and you realize shit just got real. Black slime is oozing from the inner corner of each eye, all viscous and sticky, clinging to the skin and eyelashes with oily filaments instead of separating into pretty little spheres like saline does. It's still pretty obvious what's going on. Honestly, the fact that Rose is weeping black goo is less of a shocker than the idea of her weeping, full stop. The goo might even be some run-of-the-mill fossil fuel, though you don't want to think about what kind of fossils those might be.

"babe i didnt mean it about the catsuit," you say, or rather try to say, because you open your mouth like a dumb-ass and half a dozen tentacles squirm in at once. They graze impudently against your teeth, not even giving a fuck that you're gnawing on them harder than you gnaw the gristle off a T-bone, and cram right past your uvula like it's rush hour on the subway and then slip down your esophagus. They probably have caviar-sized orifices on the ends and are gonna lay some filthy goop-eggs in your stomach that'll hatch later and eat you from the inside out. This is the end. Roll credits.

Sweet baby Jesus it's Christmas and you're getting the gift of not dying: you see a flash of blonde and black over Rose's shoulder, and hear the zap of the electric bokken you alchemitized last night while you were working off the last of the fever dream (Protip: never trust beverages from nakodiles, no matter how wicked the apple juice craving.)

Rose's glowy eyes roll back in her head, and the tentacles dissipate like they were just smoke to begin with. The crap in your esophagus at the time drops down like a bad swallow of Pop-Tart mush. You'll probably be shitting grimdark for weeks.

"thanks dude," you say to yourself.

Yourself is looking fine in his tuxedo, holding a swooned-out Rose in his arms like the dashing hero everyone knows you are.

"no big," says the other you, with a shrug that makes Rose's head loll against his shoulder. "just saved two damsels in distress before i even got my wheaties, whata fucking champ."

"im no damsel in distress," you say, although to be honest you are considering throwing yourself a full-on bitch-fit because of all the slime on your threads and look at this, you broke a fucking nail.

"shit son your the sly motherfucker all the damsels wish they could be. the kind of damsel that keeps a knife in her bikini," yourself answers. "that's some straight-up james bond shit."

"okay im that kind of damsel," you say.

"damsel with a dick," yourself says.

"whoa now you are crossing some serious boundaries," you say. "messing with the minds of the masses and their binary what-the-fucks."

"yeah im getting all progressive up in here." Yourself smirks like some academic daredevil about to blow the minds of some punk-ass undergrads.

"so progressive its aggressive, sicknasty and impressive," you say. The gears spinning around somewhere send out a chill baseline, all grind-grind-creak-and-crack.

"fightin the patriarchy thats oppressive, harshin the hater party with ill missives," yourself raps back, and you two are seriously just the most awesome dudes that ever trolled Rose's feminism forum that one time.

Rose makes a noise, all soft and stupid like a baby cat, and nuzzles into yourself's shoulder. You are seriously gonna get her some feline-themed accessories. Like those headbands with the cat ears glued on, yeah. Those are the best. The squiddles are cute and all but you just can't look at cephalopods the same way again.

"okay im outta here," you say. "gonna change out of my action pajamas into those fly threads there and get this time loop stable like a cradle."

"props," says yourself, and you guys would fist bump, but Rose is actually an inch or so taller than you and it's a four-limb job keeping her vertical. Yourself could probably just dump her on the deck but you guess he's got his reasons. "hey man, word to the wise, put that away first," yourself says with a sly just-us-mens nod at your boner. Yeah you have a boner, so the fuck what. Dick-dude has a mind of its own and isn't even paying attention half the time. So don't start assuming there are correlations where there aren't. "the poor girls already fainted once today," yourself adds.

"roger that," you say, and salute the coolest kid you've ever met.


End file.
